In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor. The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
This novel has stayed with me all these many years, permanently emblazoned on my brain. The weight of the things these young soldiers carried as they tromped through the jungle in Vietnam has become a weight inside me, a good weight because I think about this story and the terrible burden—the literal and the emotional--of soldiers in whatever war they might be fighting.
Long ago, I talked about the cumulative sentence, how it propels forward and spirals back. The forward motion is created by adding specific details, and the spiraling back is created because the details elaborate on something in the initial base clause. There’s a third motion: burrowing, going deeper because the details create depth. Frances Christenson, an English Professor at USC, wrote in his essay collection, Notes Toward a New Rhetoric: 6 Essays for Teachers, that the cumulative sentence’s modifiers are “downshifting and backtracking.” It’s an interesting syntactical motion, with contradictory forces at work.
What I appreciate about this sentence is its efficiency. With the simile, O’Brien simultaneously describes his character and America with his list of six phrases:
1. Big and strong
2. Full of good intentions
3. A roll of fat jiggling at his belly
4. Slow of foot always plodding along
5. Always there when you needed him
6. A believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor
The list includes both positive and negative attributes, which is a powerful way to create a complex, dynamic character, and, in this case, a country. The mix of physical details, “big and strong,” “a roll of fat jiggling at his belly,” and “slow of foot always plodding along,” is juxtaposed with emotional or intangible details, creating more complexity. O’Brien varied the phrases by length and syllable count, building to the longest one, #6 with 21 syllables.
O’Brien uses anaphora, the repetition at the beginning of a phrase, clause, or sentence, to create more rhythm and emotion: “always plodding along,” “always there when you needed him.”
In the sixth phrase, O’Brien uses polysyndeton, the overuse of conjunctions to differentiate and distinguish each element in his list: “virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor.”
Your Turn
1. Open with an independent clause that includes a simile, comparing your subject to something else.
2. Write six phrases that add specific details to the subject. Make sure that the details apply to both the subject and whatever the subject is being compared to.
3. In that list, can you include both positive and negative traits? Physicality and the intangible? Can you vary the length of the phrases?
4. Is there room for anaphora?
5. For polysyndeton?
Try it!
Let me know how it goes!
About Me
I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word” and “Cultivating Your Prose” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007. In each of these classes, we spend 10 to 15 weeks drenched in the beauty of sentences, reading them and writing them. It’s such a pleasure! I’ve watched my writing and my students’ writing blossom with this practice of paying close attention to the sentence.
Please visit my website to find all of my books: ninaschuyler.com (including “How to Write Stunning Sentences” and “Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal).
My new novel Afterword is available now! If your book club chooses my book to read, I can Zoom in and talk to the group. So far, I’ve done three of these events and they’re really fun.
Order links:
Podcast!
I had the pleasure and honor of talking to Dallas Woodburn on her podcast Thriving Authors! We talked about my research of artificial intelligence, how I went about writing a nonhuman character, and more.
Here’s the link to listen:
https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/kvaCzcHPRAb
Love love love cumulative sentences! Years ago when I was searching for all things cumulative sentences, I happened across Brooks Landon, Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. His book Building Great Sentences includes 15 Chapters with titles like "How Sentences Grow" (Chapter 4), "Degrees of Suspensiveness" (Chapter 11), and "Balanced Series and Serial Balances" (Chapter 12). Now, following Nina Schuyler's Stunning Sentences on her Substack, I'm prompted weekly to improve "all things cumulative." Thank's Nina!
Such an interesting sentence, describing a person and a nation at once. I think I read the short story version of The Things They Carried, but not the novel, not yet, but thanks for moving it up my list. I was really impressed with “Going After Cacciato,” about a soldier who kept deserting, because he no longer believed the Vietnam War was a good idea, and his platoon kept going after him and bringing him back. The story ends when they finally let him go: Cacciato had always wanted to see Paris and, since he can’t go back across the Pacific, he decides to walk overland through Laos, Burma, and India, across western Asia to the Bosporus and from there to France. No one knows whether he’ll make it, but they hope he does, and they imagine him hobnobbing with writers and artists in Parisian cafes while they are still trying to stay alive and intact in the endless war. What a writer!